


It’s The Little Things That Matter Most

by orphan_account



Series: Be It Win, Lose, or Draw, Everyone for Omaha [2]
Category: College hockey RPF, Hockey RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: Abuse of Authority, And love, Established Relationship, M/M, chapter 2 is pure fluff, college hockey boys, meanie coach is a meanie, only a little though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-11-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 17:28:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nebraska-Omaha vs. Cornell (October 26th, 2013)</p><p>Final score: 4-3, Cornell</p><p>Three stars: Joel Lowry (Cornell), Ryan Walters (UNO), Patrick McCarron (Cornell)</p><p>Cornell swept the weekend, also beating Nebraska-Omaha 5-3 on Friday night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously these boys are their own autonomous selves. I own none of them and this is a work of fiction. Enjoy!
> 
> POV Zahn Raubenheimer

                Hockey was by far, bar none, Zahn’s favorite thing.

                He knew it sounded super cheesy, but it was the honest-to-god truth.

                He loved it all; the rink, the ice, the movement of the game, the precision of the passes, the grace of the wingers, the speed of the centers, the strength of the D-men…and, of course, winning.

                Winning was the only option.

                Seriously.

                He’d grown up in the rinks. Practice at five am, lifting at three, game at six or seven or eight. Story of his life.

                But hockey was more than his life. When Zahn played hockey, he got into a zone, a zone where he knew what he wanted and he knew how to get it. Hockey was his obsession.

                It was the little things that Zahn missed most when he was out.

                The feel of perfectly worn-in skates. The clean scent of fresh ice. The little flutter in his stomach that never failed to appear when he stepped onto the rink.  The way he left gravity behind when he was on the ice. How his whole body—from his blood out to his skin—would vibrate in anticipation when he knew there was hockey to be played. The camaraderie in the locker room. He missed his boys.

                He sat in his stall only minutes before the puck was set to drop, securing his knee with pretty much an entire roll of black tape and soaking up the ambience around him. He watched Massa and Kirky and Reed strapping on their giant pads, laughing. As usual, the guys with the most difficult, most thankless jobs had the highest spirits, even after the loss the previous night. Everybody knew that goalies all had a touch if insanity. They stood in front of flying rubber disks that could break bones; they had to be certifiably insane in order to do that, right? Everybody knew goalies were weird. As a whole, they liked to be alone, had all kinds of funny quirks and habits (as in, Massa called almost everyone by an arbitrarily-assigned nickname, Reed devoured sliced almonds like they were going out of style, and Kirky—according to the boys on his junior team—had a weird tendency to wear shorts all winter long) and were a breed all their own.

                He watched Johnnie lace and relace his skates with new bright white laces. Watched Mikey struggle to reattach his full visor to his helmet, muttering, “Fuckin’ _fishbowl”_ intermittently. Watched DZ and Archie and Wally shove at each other and exchange quiet chirps.  Watched Guentzel talking to Johnnie and receiving a quick butt-tap before heading back to his own stall. Watched Ortega and Brady chat about what limbs they would break if they jumped out of the rafters into the rink. Watched Megs and Pearcer sit opposite each other on the floor, silently enthralled in what had to have been round thirty or so of a very serious and very bitter card game they’d had going since Zahn could really remember. Watched Simo and O’Rourke sit thigh to thigh on the bench, connected by the earbuds of Simo’s iPod. Watched Brock watch him watching the boys. He caught Brock’s eye and threw him a smile.

                Zahn had never met anyone quite like Brock, someone so bright and fiery and reckless, so talented that it seemed to spill out of his pores and drip down onto the ice and make everyone around him just… _better_. Brock could play with anyone, with _everyone,_ and still be so, _so_ good. He could skate through a pack of D-men with the grace of an angel, and make it look easy. He was tough. Once, in their freshman year, he’d watched Brock skate a game and an overtime with a hole in his sock and a blister rubbing his heel bloody. Brock was probably the most obnoxious person he’d ever met in his entire _life_ , but in the past three years, he’d spent more time with him than without him, or with almost anyone else, and a lot of it was by choice.

                The noise in the room wound down slowly as last minute stick and skate checks were done, mouth guards were taken out of cases, and game faces were put on. The team huddled in the tunnel, waiting for the game to start. “Okay,” Mikey began, trying to psych them all up real quick. “Nobody give a fuckin’ inch out there. There’s always a place for a shot to go in; you just gotta find it.”

                 “Do the little details,” DZ added.

                “Full sixty minutes!” Johnnie shouted from the back of the huddle.

                “Let’s fuckin’ win us a hockey game here,” Cooper grunted.

                Someone (Simo) let out a coyote howl.

                “Now, what are we?” Mikey shouted.

                “MAVERICKS!” came the answering call.

                “Hells yes we are! Let’s fuckin’ do this, boys!”

                They skated out in a practiced jumble of chaos, slicing hard into the brand new ice. As he stepped onto the surface of the rink, Zahn’s toes hummed and the tips of his fingers went cold inside his gloves. His heart pounded right underneath his skin.

                Massa skated into the crease, hacking at his little blue semicircle with his blades. Archie skated figure eights between the points, humming softly to himself. DZ twisted out around the boards with his typical easy grace. Wally and Megs glided side by side, talking. O’Rourke put Massa’s water bottle on top of the net and tapped the goalie’s leg pad with his stick as a “good luck you got this” gesture. Johnnie sprinted down the ice, and Guentzy playfully swung his stick at Brady, both of them laughing. All the boys began banking shots off Massa, flinging some too high or high-and-wide to slam sharply against the glass, startling little yelps from the kids seated in the section just behind the net.

                Zahn’s brain shut off as soon as the first puck dropped.  He only registered a few moments after that, his mind holding onto them like snapshots.

                Guentzel getting tagged in the face by an errant stick moments before he himself got tagged in the back of the helmet. Shake it off, he thought. No fear. Focus. He straightened up and braced for another whistle.

                Cooper literally upending a Cornell defenseman; head-over-blades, ass on the ice, stunned to get up, upended. The smirk on Coop’s face when no penalty was called. The back-pat Reed gave him once he was back on the bench, and the congratulatory praise the goalie gave, the flat vowels in his words practically screaming “Manitoba”.

                And losing.

                Wally putting it in— _in in in in_ —just after the horn went, and pushing and shoving at the goal-mouth and grabbing someone’s jersey and pulling them away, pulling them away because Brock was there and Brock did not need to fight and screaming swearwords and fingers, fingers in his face, in his cage, pulling, tugging, and then his helmet was gone and then he was rolling over on the ice, fighting to pin the other player to the ice until a ref pulled them apart. “Break it up!” the striped man commanded. “That’s enough! Both of you! Are you through now?”

                Zahn nodded tightly, and the man released his arm. Lowry— _Lowry, it was Lowry_ —rose and retrieved his equipment, glaring at him. Handshakes. Stick salute. Skating off.  “We. Are. So. Dead,” DZ murmured as they trudged down the tunnel into the room. The comment was met with a chorus of groans, sighs, blasphemy, and other lovely remarks.

                Coach paced around the room, addressing the entire team, smacking his palm with a rolled-up stack of papers, probably the lineup. “You looked like a bunch of fucking losers out there tonight! Losers! Not because of the final score, no!” He made his left thumb and forefinger into an “L” and planted it on Archie’s forehead. “Loser for letting your emotions rule your game! Take another dumb penalty and I’ll have your butt on the bench so fast you’ll get whiplash!” He stamped Simo, Brady, Megs, and everybody else within reach: “Loser for giving up on your man…loser for going easy in the corners…loser for that pansy-ass checking—you oughta be _ashamed_ of yourself, Megna—and you!” He whirled on Zahn, startling him, and planted the “L” right on the center of his forehead, right between his eyes. “You’re the biggest loser of all, Raubenheimer! You’re finally good to play and you take a fucking _facemasking_ penalty and a goddamn _game misconduct?_ After the game is over?!”  He smacked Zahn in the back of the head with the tightly rolled paper tube, making him see red and yellow. Zahn wouldn’t have recommended that anyone try it; it hurt like hell if you’d never been privy to such a smack before. “Have I made myself, clear?” he shouted. “No! More! Idiot! Penalties!” They all nodded, swallowing hard. Coach turned to the entire team again, “You better all come prepared to work Monday.  Translation? I plan to make practice a living hell.”

                Everybody groaned but nobody contested the statement.

                The Rink Nazi had spoken.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some fluff. With Zahn and Brock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So Vala's Pumpkin Patch is a place. And you can buy buckets of mini chocolate chip cookies there. And they are deeeelish.
> 
> Also.
> 
> Points for Canadian slang from a real Canadian.
> 
> "Gitch—a slangy Canadian name for underwear, often referring to a guy's briefs."
> 
> Bonus points for using “whump” in onomatopoeia.

                “Brooooooock! Come oooooon. Wake up, you big lump.” Zahn slammed his pillow down on Brock’s head. True to form, Brock was buried under a literal mountain of blankets, just the top of his head and that _stupid_ fucking mop of sandy hair sticking out of the pile of down and microfleece. Brock mumbled something unintelligible, swatted lazily in Zahn’s direction, and rolled back over, covering himself completely in blankets. “How can you even be under all those blankets and not, like, explode, anyways?” he asked, ruffling his boyfriend’s flow. “You’re always running at like a thousand degrees.”

                “Fernhurt?” came a muffled question from the pile.

                Zahn laughed, “What?”

                Brock finally surfaced, pulling at least four blankets off his head before sitting up and smirking. “Fahrenheit? Or Celsius?”

                “OH MY GOD I’M NOT EVEN THAT CANADIAN!”

                Brock chuckled, laying his head on Zahn’s lap. “We have had this discussion. You are the most Canadian Canadian in the world.”

                “Oh my god, shut the fuck up. Just—seriously, Brock—shut the fuck up and never talk again.”

                “Noooooo,” he teased, “You loooove me, Zaaaahn.”

                “I really don’t. I really hate you.”

                “Nuh-uh.”

                “Ayup. Shit, Brock. I hate you loads. Just being around you ruins my day.”

                That was bullshit and they both knew it.

                There was actually nobody that Zahn would rather waste a day with than his boyfriend.

                The boy with the long flow he loved to run his hands through, who liked to smirk at Zahn and make snarky comments under his breath, whether they fit the situation or not, who pressed him up against the kitchen counter in their tiny university apartment before early morning practices and whispered dirty things in his ear to make him blush and whine before kissing him quickly on the cheek and sprinting to get his gear bag ready, who called him a geek when he sat up late in the library, but who brought him cup after cup of coffee—two sugars, two creams, and a splash of one-percent milk—and rambled in a whisper about how boring libraries were, yet stayed until Zahn was ready to leave, even if he had finished all his own work hours previously, who would kiss him awake and call him in the middle of class just to say he missed him and pick up two of his favorite definitely-not-on-his-nutrition-plan red-velvet-with-chocolate-chips cupcakes after a big test.

                “Zahn. Zaaaa-aaaahn.”

                “Eh?”

                A smile flitted across Brock’s face. “Tha’s about the fifth time I said your name.”

                He forced a frown, “Did you _want_ something, Monsieur Montpetit?”

                “I think it was _you_ who wanted something. You better have, ‘cause if you woke me up for nothing, we are breaking up, to-day.”

                He gasped and clapped his hands, “Yes! I remember now. We have to go to the pumpkin patch.”

                “No.”

                “Pleeeaaaase?”

                “ _No_.”

                “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease, Brock?”

                “ _No_ , Zahn.”

                He pouted, stealing Brock’s pillow and hugging it to his chest. “But…but…I _wanted_ to.”

                Brock stared at him for a moment, before heaving a sigh, rolling his eyes, and slumping on top of Zahn. “Fine. _Fine._ I will go to Vala’s with you…if you let me eat a bucket of cookies.”

                Zahn grinned. “Deal. But first,” he sighed exasperatedly. “Put on some pants. Your gitch is showing.”

                “Puh-lease,” Brock smirked.” You love my gitch.”

                “Uh yeah. Duh.”

*

                Zahn buried his face in the hay at the end of the long slide he had just fallen out of. “Delicious,” he murmured.

                “Are you smelling the hay?” Brock laughed as he landed beside him with a soft _whump_.

                “It smells good!” he insisted, brushing away a chunk of hair that had fallen into his eyes after tumbling out of the long, static-y tube. 

                “You’re such a fuckin’ weirdo,” Brock snorted as he smoothed back is own hair, smoke-scented from the fifty or so open bonfires surrounding them.

                “Yeah, well,” he shrugged as he leaned over to wipe a streak of dirt off of Brock’s forehead.

                “Thanks, Mom,” he drawled, rolling his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, so this is the second in this series of fics with RPF characters that no one knows. See the (unfinished) primer for this work for more info :)
> 
>  
> 
> (Note: "DomZom" in Part One and "DZ" here are the same person; both are junior forward Dominic Zombo, and it stands to reason that Brock and Zahn would refer to him by different names.)


End file.
